In horror

In a hour from now a grandmother will get in her car and leave this town driving up to Connecticut. I held the grandmother and grandfather in my arms last night as we prayed to make sense of the horror which had visited their family. Their granddaughter had been one of those 20 children slaughtered and there are no easy bromides that we can cart out to cover it all up as some part of God's plan. This beautiful child had been here in Southern Shores and with all of her energy she had run the Turkey Trot and laughed. Her grandfather laughed about how much energy she had and then cried because he would never see that energy again in this life from her.

Years ago B.F. Skinner wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity where he suggested that the use of behavior modification could free us from the morass of the freedoms we use for the destruction of others. There is no doubting that freedom, the freedom to push violence as the answer to problems and the freedom to posses weapons of destruction are part of the problem. Some preachers are uncomfortable with freedom and end up pushing the idea of God as a monstrous Big B.F. Skinner in the sky who runs sadistic experiments on us as a test to see if we pass the "finals" of the course of life. I utterly reject that kind of God and yet secretly wish for a God who would take all freedom out of our hands so we do not keep killing each other.

Today in the darkness of the freedom chosen by a misguided individual and society, God is here as we gather together in the midst of things we cannot understand and work to find a way to redeem the irredeemable.